Simon Callow

Childhood didn't have a big influence on me, really - in fact I spent most of it plotting how to escape.

My mother wanted me to be a teacher. She had this vision of me walking across the quadrangle in an Oxford college wearing my academic gown.

The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

Increasingly I've come to think that what's at the core of acting is thinking. Most people would say it's feeling.

He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer.

Shakespeare speaks for the human heart but Dickens speaks for the social man and for injustices.

When children have grieving parents it's also common for them to feel an obligation to cheer them up and make them happy.

I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.

Bleak House is just the most astounding piece of work. There's huge, visionary poetry in it.